Probing 7-branes on Orbifolds

TL;DR

This paper explores the properties of 7-branes wrapped on orbifolds, specifically C2/Zn, and characterizes the resulting superconformal field theories, including their symmetries, spectra, and dualities.

Contribution

It systematically characterizes 7-brane theories on orbifolds, extending known results to new geometric configurations and deriving magnetic quivers via duality with M5 branes.

Findings

Characterization of global symmetries of orbifold 7-brane theories

Determination of Coulomb-branch operator spectra

Construction rules for magnetic quivers

Abstract

D3 branes in the vicinity of an E6, E7, or E8 stack of 7-branes in flat space are known to host at low energy a famous class of strongly-coupled N = 2 superconformal field theories featuring exceptional global symmetry. What if, instead, the 7-branes wrap an orbifold? We give a systematic characterization of such theories in the case of C2/Zn, and determine their main properties, like global symmetries, spectra of Coulomb-branch operators, and patterns of Higgs-branch flows. We put forward a set of rules to construct their magnetic quivers, which directly generalize what happens in the perturbative case, and later derive them using the duality with M5 branes probing M9 walls.